UK Gov't Plans To Censor "Extremist" Websites Via Orders To ISPs

Not content with blacklisting certain kinds of pornography, writes an anonymous reader, according to this news from The Guardian, "The UK government is to order broadband companies to block extremist websites and empower a specialist unit to identify and report content deemed too dangerous for online publication. The crime and security minister, James Brokenshire, said on Wednesday that measures for censoring extremist content would be announced shortly. The initiative is likely to be controversial, with broadband companies already warning that freedom of speech could be compromised."

Re:Well,

[Internetuser1248]

IRA, Hizbollah and Hamas are all nationalistic organisations in countries that are under intense external pressure, either politically, militarily or economically, to such an extent that the general population are suffering. The same was true of Germany in the 1930's. While I agree with the points you make I feel that most discussions on this topic miss the most important point of all. Yes democracy can throw up some problem leaders, but ignoring the circumstances that lead up to each of these cases is failing to learn lessons from history. While it is possible that removing the treaty of Versailles may not have prevented the nazis' rise to power, it seems almost certain that Hamas would never have been elected without the Israeli blockade and attacks. It also seems hard to imagine the IRA getting any power in a world where Ireland was not subject to brutal repression for a couple of centuries.

Democracy is not the problem, it is imperialism that is the problem. Desperate people act desperately, and voting is no exception.

Re:Its almost like...

[Kjella]

Heavy on the hyperbole are we? And "today's governments" is mostly the US government. Our incarceration rate is 1/10th of the US. We don't have a Gitmo. The 1% is getting richer but with the march of technology the TVs are getting bigger, the smartphones smarter so I can't see any real decline in living standard even though the gap is widening. As for rights, go back to the pre-Internet days and see how much they controlled the mass media back then. They're still trying to put Internet back in the bag, for all the attempts at trying I'd say in most ways we're freer in the 2010s than the 1980s, though there might have been a wild west gap in between. Granted, there's not much progress being made but the trend isn't horribly bad [wikipedia.org] either.

Re:Gaining speed down that slope...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what happened the last time a British government tried to censor media in matters of extremism and terrorism (in this case, IRA-related organizations):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4409447.stm

Spoiler: it didn't do a damn thing.

It will be interesting to see whether Islamic terrorists manage to do what Irish terrorists couldn't, namely, make Britain clamp down on basic freedoms.